Moodle plugins directory: Course dedication | Moodle.org
Course dedication
NOTE: This plugin has a new maintainer.
Thanks to the University of Canterbury for sponsoring the upgrade work to support Moodle 4.0 and the new report builder API.
Introduction
This block allows to see the estimated dedication time to a Moodle course by the participants of the course.
How dedication time is estimated?
Time is estimated based in the concepts of Session and Session duration applied to Moodle's log entries:
- Click: every time that a user access to a page in Moodle a log entry is stored.
- Session: set of two or more consecutive clicks in which the elapsed time between every pair of consecutive clicks does not overcome an established maximum time.
- Session duration: elapsed time between the first and the last click of the session.
Features
This block is intended to be used only by teachers, however the block can be configured to show dedication time to students too.
Teachers can use a tool to analyse dedication time within a course. The tool provides three reporting methods:
- Dedication time of the course: calculates total dedication time, mean dedication time and connections per day for each student, which you can filter by course group if required.
- Dedication of a student: detailed sessions for a student with start date & time, duration and ip.
- Report builder source: The plugin includes a custom report builder source to allow for site-level reporting to be generated.
Credits
Original developed by Aday Talavera, CICEI at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria University
Updated to support Moodle 1.9 - Moodle 3.X by Borja Rubio Reyes.
Support for Moodle 4.0 was sponsored by the University of Canterbury.
Useful links
Screenshots
Contributors
Could you please elaborate more on the answer you gave to Macrocap?
To remove any minimum session duration, do you need to set "Ignore session limit" to 0 minutes?
Morover, how do I manually delete historical data?
Thanks for your time
You will need an experienced user to delete the data within the dedication tables using a sql query and that understands how to run CLI scripts - the dedication plugin includes a CLI script that allows you to re-generate data. If you work with a Moodle Partner they should be able to help with this.
We have installed this block on a site with around 60k users and we found that the background task generated a LOT of database activity. So much that we deactivated the background task until we understand better how the block / background task is meant to behave. We have a few questions about the task:
* Is it normal for the task to drive high database load?
* Is there any way to moderate / reduce the amount of processing it is doing?
* Would the task (when installed on an existing busy site) have an initial period of high database load (processing historical log data) followed by a more moderate database load profile once it has processed all historical data (caught up)?
* Is there a way to filter the courses that this task runs for and perhaps whitelist / filter those that it should caluclate for?
Many thanks - please advise if this kind of query should be added somewhere else instead of here =/
https://github.com/catalyst/moodle-block_dedication/blob/MOODLE_404_STABLE/classes/task/dedication_collector.php#L48
There is also a cli task which you can run manually if you would like to generate further historical data.
There is always room for improving how a plugin works - if you have internal development capablities, pull requests are always welcome, alternatively feel free to reach out privately if you would like to fund further development on the plugin.
We create personalized reports on our students with Moodle's integrated reporting tool, but we realize that if we use the plugin data as a source we cannot filter the students by group.
Would it be possible to add, in addition to the course and student data, the data of the group to which they belong?
Unfortunately, Moodle's custom reports do not allow you to create a report using different sources and if we use the source of this plugin we cannot create filters with the groups.
We thought it would be very useful to have this information in the reports.
Would this be possible?
Thank you very much in advance.
first, thanks to the mainteinance team for this great work. I have a question and I'm not sure if it's possible but...is there any way to add a completion rule (i.e.: students must have 2 hours of dedication time)?
BR
first, thanks to the mainteinance team for this great work. I have a question and I'm not sure if it's possible but...is there any way to add a completion rule (i.e.: students must have 2 hours of dedication time)?
BR
@Jesús - that's not something currently supported, but feel free to reach out privately if you would like to fund the development required to do this.